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mattydread23 writes with an opinion piece naming a few reasons Firefox OS is likely to succeed "It's geared toward low-powered hardware in a way that Google doesn't care as much about with Android, it's cheap enough for the pre-paid phones that are much more common than post-paid in developing countries, and most important, there are still 3.5 billion people in the world who have feature phones and for whom this will be an amazing upgrade."
I'd push greater commitment to keeping the essential components of the system under FOSS licenses onto the head of that list.

Actually, the fact that it runs firefox is interesting: it'll help keep the browser market heteregenous, which is what's best for both devs and users in the long run. We don't need another browser dominating the market just like IE did: it gives them too much power.

What is wrong with AMD? The dirty little secret of the CPU industry is that chips went from "good enough" to insanely overpowered several years so unless you are doing a job that needs every last drop of power you can squeeze (wave simulation, heavy number crunching) you'd be hard pressed in a blind trial to tell an AMD from an Intel....except when you got the bill and saw how much money you can save.

Check out the AMD Jaguar quads [newegg.com] for example (if you can find one, they are selling like hotcakes) for what you can get for cheap nowadays. We are talking 4 Jaguar cores (the same cores powering the XBone and PS4) with Radeon HD8400 GPU capable of running 1080P video with a board that will hold 32Gb of RAM, all for $150. If you want insanely cheap you can grab an AMD E350 [newegg.com] which I've used a LOT of in the shop and which makes a cheap and easy upgrade path for all those aging power piggie P4s, simply slap in a PCI to IDE adapter and they can keep their old drives while getting an upgrade to dual cores that again will do 1080P while using less power under load than a P4 does idling. So I'd say we HAVE a good competitor, frankly the only slot where AMD doesn't have a competing product is in the ultra hardcore market and that is a teeny tiny niche compared to mainstream.

As for TFA? I'd say its gonna all come down to support. If Mozilla can take control of the update process away from the carriers, who have a vested interest in trying to get you to buy a new phone, so that all MozPhones get say 3 years of updates? Then I think they really have a shot here in the states too as I don't know how many folks I've talked to that are seriously pissed at their Android phones because the carriers are so piss poor when it comes to pushing updates. Hell even the $300+ phones are lucky if they even get a year of support from the carriers and it makes folks feel ripped off, If Moz can get out a decent dual core phone at a sweet price ($150 or less should be doable with a dual core and a Gb of RAM) they could really grab some share away from Android, and this is from someone with an Android that I love but I had to ROM it to get a later version. Offer me a dual core for $150 or less that gets 3 years of support? I'm there.

1.3 build is f'ing awesome. Most of the problems with have been fixed. This is coming from somebody who was extremely critical of it (even though excited initially because of its freedom aspects). After 1.2 and finally 1.3 (on the ZTE open) it actually works pretty well. I'm not this person. I think 1.0 release with ZTE open (I have this version, haven't tried 1.3... which is like a beta release or not even) worked OK, but it definitely has some early-adopter type issues. Lack of apps (not that I'm a big ap

The entire premise of this article seems to revolve around the unsubstantiated claim that Android is poorly optimized for low-end devices. I disagree with that claim, so the entire premise of the article seems suspect to me.

True, but U.S. CDMA carriers still refuse to activate low-end Android phones of today on a feature phone plan. And among U.S. GSM carriers, the one with more coverage still has a habit of automatically adding a data plan to a SIM with voice-only service inserted into a smartphone [slashdot.org]. These behaviors are why I still carry a tablet and dumbphone. Will carriers perform the same sort of tying on Firefox OS devices, or will they let customers use cellular voice with only Wi-Fi data?

AT&T has wifi only and low data plans on GoPhone prepaid for Smartphones.
http://www.att.com/shop/wirele... [att.com]
The prepaid landscape is changing pretty rapidly in the US, which is nice for those of us who like to buy our own phones.

AT&T has wifi only and low data plans on GoPhone prepaid for Smartphones.

The words "wifi" and "ethernet" do not appear on that page.

If you're doing wifi-only, get yourself a static IP, run asterisk, use any old cellphone with SIP support and wifi and skip AT&T, as they are fuckers of the highest degree. Their prices are beyond fucking ridiculous. They want $50/mo for a land line. I got SIP for about ten bucks a month. My Xperia Play is now our cordless phone, and it's also a neato clock. My server is a $20 pogoplug, but in fairness I bought two of them so I could do HA.

OTOH, cheap plans with ample mobile data are readily available here, and even if you can't always get 3G the bandwidth is still pretty good, even in the subway--they apparently have repeaters installed in the tunnels.

If you're doing wifi-only, get yourself a static IP, run asterisk, use any old cellphone with SIP support and wifi and skip AT&T, as they are fuckers of the highest degree. Their prices are beyond fucking ridiculous. They want $50/mo for a land line. I got SIP for about ten bucks a month. My Xperia Play is now our cordless phone, and it's also a neato clock. My server is a $20 pogoplug, but in fairness I bought two of them so I could do HA.

$50/mo for a landline is stupid, but make a fair comparison -- you can't rate a system that requires a/.er to design and set up against one that a person with an IQ of room temperature can use.

You can use freepbx which makes asterisk fairly simple, and use a carrier like flowroute who will provide you all necessary config info. You can even buy a device from most SIP providers which you can hook your POTS phones up to, if you don't want to think. I have a rtp300, but I'm having problems with it. But I also have a PoE SIP phone and some android phones, which have pretty good SIP support.

You can use freepbx which makes asterisk fairly simple, and use a carrier like flowroute who will provide you all necessary config info. You can even buy a device from most SIP providers which you can hook your POTS phones up to, if you don't want to think. I have a rtp300, but I'm having problems with it. But I also have a PoE SIP phone and some android phones, which have pretty good SIP support.

You're either making a joke or have never delt with "normals" much.I count probably a dozen words in that sentence that would make a normal's eyes glaze over.There is no way the average person is going to do that. To give you one example, my dadcalled me once because all his applications disappeared. Come to find out he had maximizeda program. Once I showed him how to hit the X to close the window he was fine.Most normals I know can't or are at least too scared to hook up a computer. They have evenbeen

Indeed, which brings me to the other thing I see 'wrong' with the article (or at least the summary) - the statement "it's cheap enough for the pre-paid phones that are much more common than post-paid".

Outside the US (not just in third-world countries, but most other developed countries), this is a false dichotomy (suggesting that only 'cheap' phones can be put on pre-paid plans). Many people with 'high end' phones (Galaxy S4, iPhone 5/5S) are on pre-paid plans. Often quite cheap ones. Actually I'd say that'

I guess it's because I left the States before mobiles really took off, but it wasn't until a trip back a couple of years ago that I started to understand the situation--the telcos have done a very good job of enforcing an integrated-vertical/everything-as-a-service model there.

But that's not how it works here (Stockholm). I do happen to have a subscription, basically because it's more convenient and I get a free phone every 2 years for signing up again. But it is entirely possible for you to get a late-mode

Sprint was a bitch about selling me a SIM for my Nexus 5s for prepaid. Offered to give it for postpaid, refused for prepaid claiming it might hurt my phone. This at their corporate store AND online chat. I had to buy Sprint SIMs from Ting. At this point I am so frustrated with the treatment that I don't think it's worth dealing with their dicky customer support to follow through with service. Plus, T-mo just doubled my 4G data for no extra fee. Ting is looking like a fun company with enthusiastic supp

yesterday's hardware does what 99% of end users want.
I'm as guilty as the last review-fixated whore in obsessing over the specs of my current and potential future phones - but with the last gen I've hit a realization.
A 1080 screen is more than enough. My CPU and GPU are absolutely fine to run anything I need. Personally (HTC One) I'd *like* to know I could crunch a benchmark faster for my geek pride - but I can't for the life of me see how any phone upgrade costing me £500+ (less ebaying of my old h

This is known and has been for a while... how many complaints on/. have there been about all the trial versions, general crapware, etc. that comes preinstalled on most factory systems?

Even at that, both Uberoid and cyanogen both have some extra apps I'll never use that I'd like to get rid of... but using the devices they are on (wm8650 based netbook and a nook color) is low priority to me, so I usually just put it off until later.

It seems to work just fine. I have a ZTE Open -- which makes low-end phones look futuristic -- running FFOS. There are some pretty impressive games that run just fine on that antique hardware. Asteroid Mania is my go-to example, as it's the only (I think?) 3d game on the platform. It's not something you'd expect would work well in HTML5, let alone on a seriously low-end phone.

Yeah, I know all the JS sucks memes, but it should be obvious by that that they're simply not true.

I can't comment on the game, as I can't play it. But from the photos, it look like a very small number of polygons, set in outer space. This is the kind of 3D we had in the early 1990s. Modern phones on the other hand are running modern 3D game engines, within full 3D environments with thousands of polys.

Do you remember the early 90's? Doom, Dark Forces, etc.? I don't recall dynamic lighting in any of the Wing Commander games -- or full-screen action for that matter.

This isn't an argument worth having. Believe what you want about the game, my point was that the tech isn't nearly as limited as people assume. What I can say is that early 2000's type games are very easily doable on crummy hardware in FFOS. You mentioned the 3GS earlier. A popular game from that era, like Wolfenstein RPG, is well within t

Not to mention its not like you HAVE to take stock android anymore, pretty much any shop now offers changing ROMs which honestly really gives the low end phones a real kick in the ass. hell after ROMing mine I decided to stay with it instead of getting a new phone as the ROM included tethering which the new ones didn't have at the time.

But as somebody who gets to mess with folks phones as well as PCs (you'd be surprised how many "can you look at this too?" I get in a day when it comes to phones) I have to s

Firefox OS doesn't run on phones with 128MB either, and Android launched on less RAM than Firefox OS requires. Nothing says a low-end device has to use the full stock Google experience; you can target the OS for lower memory devices.

Android launched on less RAM but the bare minimum, according to wikipedia, is 340MB and recommended minimum is 512MB. That's after Google did a clean-up, specifically to make KitKat less bloated than ICS.

The entire premise of this article seems to revolve around the unsubstantiated claim that Android is poorly optimized for low-end devices. I disagree with that claim, so the entire premise of the article seems suspect to me.

Android requires OpenGL ES, both in the 1.0 and 2.0 flavors. For devices in developing countries, that's a very high bar.

That's also not a knock against Android. For higher end devices that's a very sensible requirement. But just looking at the minimum requirements, it's not compatible with low end in the developing world.

I've seen this before though and this is the same wheel that everyone goes through.

"Look we got our system to run with 50% less memory!"

"Ok, so we sacrificed all of the features people expect these days, and in the last 3 years prices have dropped sufficiently that our product is no longer needed, but just wait for our next version!"

The better approach is to tackle low end devices like Microsoft and Google are already doing (And WP8 runs very well on low end systems) but not let it be your driving focus. Because inevitably what's a "high end" phone today will be a $5 prepaid phone in 3 years.

That's certainly my situation. Fortunately there were no irreversible upgrades, unlike the AC. But I'm pretty much forced to cancel all attempted updates because the phone won't handle them. (Mainly memory. I don't have enough on-phone memory to run just the raw OS (and vendor shit) once I accept upgrades. I freed up over a third of my memory by rolling back upgrades of the core Google apps.) Thankfully they clearly separate security upgrades from brand-upgrades. Oh wait, no, they don't.

It's no secret that innovation in the low-end of the market is high on the priority of manufacturers. Margins are low, and in combination with carrier policies, it's much more profitable to focus on high end handsets. Low end one are few years ago tech, repackaged, with unoptimized software. Google itself has been guilty of pushing Android to perform well on the high end, neglecting the low-end. Gingerbread still lives because it is the last Android OS to perform somehow well on low-end hardware. Even Googl

Didn't you get the memo? With the announcement of SteamOS, the "Year of the Linux Desktop" has been moved to 2015 (Valve Time, so maybe 2016 or 2017). Of course the "desktop" has also been moved to the livingroom, so plan accordingly.

I wouldn't go that far. Its entirely possible that Firefox OS could become a major player in the market segment the article indicates. The problem is that saying "...will become the Mobile OS to Beat" implies the major players like Android, iOS, and Windows even want to win that game in the first place. Absolutely there are lots of people who cannot afford the top of the line smartphones out there, and it would be nice if someone serviced their needs, but the problem is time. In time, technology will improve and costs will continue to drop relative to computing power. Its very dangerous to target a market Moore's Law is scheduled to destroy.

For Firefox OS to be the mobile OS "to beat" requires a lot of things to happen that aren't trivial exercises. First, Firefox OS has to become the dominant player in the low end market. Second, it has to achieve a level of brand loyalty comparable to iOS and significantly higher than Android itself (Android users are typically more loyal to their smartphone manufacturer than the operating system itself in my experience). It then has to be able to parlay that brand loyalty into a way to maintain their hold on those users as the smartphone industry advances to the point where the $20 phone of tomorrow is the $600 phone of today. And it must do this in a way that doesn't give the major players an easy way to encompass Firefox's feature set: if FirefoxOS's major innovations are based on open standards and HTML5 applications, anything it can do today Android and iOS could easily do tomorrow if they wanted to.

So much has to go right besides "sell a lot of low end feature phones" that to me it would be like predicting that the company that supplies most of the paper to print air travel tickets in kiosks was a threat to take over the entire travel industry in a decade.

Absolutely there are lots of people who cannot afford the top of the line smartphones out there

There are also people who can afford the phone but not the plan. Virgin Mobile, for instance, charges $336 per year more for service on an Android phone than for service on a dumbphone. I can keep service on a dumbphone for $7 per month, but if I wanted to activate an Android phone, that'd cost no less than $35 per month. Wouldn't carriers lump Firefox OS with the smartphones that require a data plan even if the subscriber plans to use only Wi-Fi data?

Lots of countries have laws that prohibit carriers from differentiating the pricing based on phone model or have carriers who aren't crooked enough that they'd want to do something like that, so the data plan for a smartphone is not necessarily going to be more expensive if you already have a data plan for your feature phone.

A minimal 100MB data plan is probably only a dollar or two in many low income countries, so it's no big deal.

"While there are now for the first time over a billion smartphones in use around the world -- a staggering number -- Ericsson estimates that there's an astonishing 4.5 billion people who own mobile phones. For those who paid attention in math class, that's 4.5 times as many."

huh??

firstly, the ratio is hardly needed to make the point...pretty sure everyone knows that 4.5 billion is alot more then 1 billion.

plus, i think the pointless math lesson would probably be more necessary for those who *didn't* pay att

Particularly since the majority of cell phone owners worldwide earn about $3,000 per year. The article is about The Battle for the "Good Enough" Market. I would doubt either Firefox or Android has a stranglehold on Baidu. http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/... [pewglobal.org]

It's over. Android has won. The iPhone will stay around with a significant market share. But current high specs for phones will be the low end in three years. 2GB Ram and a 1.5 Ghz Quad Core CPU with be in entry level Android devices in 2017. Enough to run Android any way you like.

Android already runs on so many phones. It already is ubiquitous. Microsoft might have a chance in a niche. Same as Firefox, if it comes down to it. The mobile phone market is a billion device market. Why not a couple thousand Windows or Firefox or Jolla or Tizen devices? Or Ubuntu for that matter.

Android already runs on low spec cheap entry level devices. Granted, it doesn't run them very well, but neither does Firefox atm.

By one billion he means per year. This year will be more of course. I think Firefox has some interesting potential, but agree with him that the incredibly high volumes of the low end of the Android device market make for amazing economies of scale. Getting under what components Android can run on may offer less scale and so no net savings at all.

Android runs just fine on cheap hardware that's the false premise of the article. There are plenty of feature phones still out there are are dying and on the way out. Just because they are feature phones doesn't mean that Android won't be their next upgrade, and hence the parent comment that Android has won.

The Samsung Galaxy Ace comes in on the most basic of plans and the only way to get a cheaper phone right now is to buy your own phone after market and get just the sim card. Even shopping after market th

But that does not mean that a new contender cannot do well. With so many apps made for android, nothing it going to knock it out of the mobile market soon, but it is a crappy enough operation system to allow good ones room to compete against its and Apples monopoly.

We are here talking about Android/Linux outselling Windows last year by 4x, and what a challenge that is to FirefoxOS/Linux. Congratulations on finding the exact wrongest possible place to put your Windows desktop 4EVAR ad.

The desktop was once everything there was, and Microsoft's control of it mattered. Now it is one fifth of everything, and Microsoft's control of it doesn't matter any more. Servers have to support these new things that cannot run IE, AD, Outlook and Office because they outnumber PCs 4:1. Corporate cannot ignore 80% of the world. Developers are suddenly aware of cross platform needs. OEMs just cannot afford to keep ignoring this Android/Linux, ChromeOS/Linux demand. And so even on the desktop with 80%

I'd push greater commitment to keeping the essential components of the system under FOSS licenses onto the head of that list.

If this really can work for ~3.5 billion people who currently don't have a decent mobile OS (a claim about which I remain skeptical), I guarantee you that at least 3.49 billion of them won't give a damn whether its FOSS or not. Of the remainder, most surely won't care whether its GPL, BSD, or PirateBay licensed.

... That it will be the most widely used browser. It grew a lot early on, but other and in many cases better products came along. Firefox browser now is all but the leader. Given the identical marketing strategy is used for Firefox OS, I just don't see how it can only be conceived that it will become the Mobile OS to beat. Seriously, has the author ever seen one of the cheap android phones out of China?

But the story with browsers is completely different. They are not marketing Firefox OS to consumers to load on to their existing phones - they are marketing it towards phones which come pre-loaded with the OS, more akin to Macintosh on the PC side - though at the far low end. Maybe Chromebook is a better example, and that is doing nicely at the moment.

And it will become the year of the Linux desktop....And the Hurd will ship...

These are not trivial issues, especially when Google's roadmap for Android is mostly about competing with iOS at the high end.

Wasn't KitKat designed for lighter footprint on smaller devices? They're not abandoning the low end. Also, computing history is littered with corpses of companies that tried to optimize for current hardware, but spent so much time/money that the hardware caught up to "bloated" software, and they were beat.

Just for reading the summary I can say this looks fishy. The latest Anroid release 4.4 was mainly dedicated to make Android run on smaller devices, adding tools to debug memory footprint, adding compresion of pages, sharing of things, etc. Google claims that now Android can run on a 512 MB device (which is fairly low end right now). And with ever decreasing memory prices is hard to imagine there's a place for a "lower than lower end" OS.

The "being open" reason is also not good enough. As a technology (i.e. removing Google services) Android is 100% free software. And the reason some telcos might want Firefox OS is to have a more closed environment which they can control.

Maybe Firefox could have been working to create its own Android fork, replacing Google service with Firefox services. That would be, IMO, much cooler.

Self thought:"Maybe it's time to upgrade my Nokia C2 for a Firefox OS phone.I don't care a fancy phone with camera(s) and social netcrap.I just need to call, maybe check mails, sometimes play a song and a lot of battery duration.The C2 can last almost ~seven days, the mp3 player is a crapy one but usable.I want to be cheap on phones... "

So, yes maybe there is a lot of people like me that only need the basics.-XP (rotate to see -XP- giving tongue to windows 8-hate.)

If I remember correctly the cheapest phones are sold for US $12 on the street in China, which are sold for US $ 10 in larger quanities direcly from the factory:http://www.bunniestudios.com/b... [bunniestudios.com]

That microscopic yet vocal minority with the power to verify the phone's operating system is probably the public's best hope against the snooping-as-usual practices currently popular among governments of certain industrialized countries.

I'd push greater commitment to keeping the essential components of the system under FOSS licenses onto the head of that list.

Except such a thing is irrelevant to all but a microscopic minority of nerds.

I totally disagree.

It's also really important to regulatory agencies like the FCC in the U.S., the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the Ministere de l'Econonie des Finances et des L'Industrie in France, the Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railway in Germany, the European Radiocommunication Office in all of Europe, the Commission for Communications Regulation, and other government a

From the "Measuring the Information Society" report report [itu.int] prepared by the United Nations International Telecommunication Union:

"Between 2010 and 2011, mobile-cellular subscriptions uptake of both fixed (wired)-broadband and mobile-registered continuous double-digit growth in developing-country markets, but an overall slowdown in comparison with previous years. The number of mobile-cellular subscriptions increased by more than 600 million, almost all of them in the developing world, to a total of around 6 b